Bitcoin fork narrative returns! New chain eCash plans to pre-mine "Satoshi's Bitcoin," sparking controversy.

Author: Nancy, PANews In 2020, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) forked to create eCash (formerly Bitcoin Cash ABC, BCHA); more than five years later, a new Bitcoin fork narrative has emerged, with another hard fork project of the same name drawing attention. Not long ago, Bitcoin developer Paul Sztorc announced the launch of a new Bitcoin hard fork network called eCash, which will be airdropped to Bitcoin holders, sparking heated discussions in the community. However, eCash has been mired in controversy even before its launch, particularly due to plans to pre-allocate a portion of tokens corresponding to Satoshi Nakamoto’s addresses to early investors and the development team. Another hard fork experiment: eCash to launch this August On April 28, Paul Sztorc announced that he is pushing for a Bitcoin hard fork project named eCash, which is expected to officially launch on August 21, 2026, at a Bitcoin block height of approximately 964,000. BREAKING: New Bitcoin Fork I am helping create a **new Bitcoin Hardfork** — dropping this August, called "eCash". – Your coins will split. For example, if you have 4.19 BTC, then you will get 4.19 eCash. – You may sell your eCash — or keep it. Or ignore it!Vegas: – Yes, I… — Paul Sztorc (@Truthcoin) April 24, 2026 The project will fork from the Bitcoin mainnet, at which point all Bitcoin holders on the chain will automatically receive an equivalent amount of eCash at a 1:1 ratio. Whether exchange users receive the airdrop will be determined by the platforms themselves. Holders are free to choose whether to sell, keep, or ignore these new coins. Sztorc is a long-time Bitcoin developer, the proposer of the Drivechains scheme, and the CEO of LayerTwo Labs, a company developing sidechains for the Bitcoin network. eCash is positioned as a long-term solution to address Bitcoin’s scalability, innovation stagnation, and governance issues. According to the introduction, the eCash Layer 1 node software will be a near-complete replica of Bitcoin Core, continuing to use the SHA-256 hashing algorithm while significantly lowering the initial mining difficulty to attract more miners to participate early. The client code will be frozen 30 days before the fork, and there are plans to launch multiple rounds of bug bounty programs in the summer. The biggest highlight of eCash is the integration of 7 Layer 2 Drivechains, covering a privacy chain (similar to Zcash), the prediction market Truthcoin, the decentralized exchange CoinShift, the NFT asset platform Bitassets, the identity system Bitnames, and the quantum-resistant network Photon. These Drivechains allow for high throughput, programmability, and diverse applications without modifying L1 rules, with the goal of supporting a global scale of 8 billion users. At the same time, they all support merged mining, allowing miners to earn additional revenue while maintaining the main chain. Drivechains is a Bitcoin sidechain scaling solution first proposed by Sztorc in 2015, which later evolved into the BIP 300 and BIP 301 proposals. This technology allows miners to use existing hash power to maintain sidechains, tightly binding sidechain security to the Bitcoin mainnet, aiming to solve Bitcoin’s scaling challenges and functional expansion bottlenecks. Sztorc has been promoting Drivechains since 2015 and previously attempted to introduce it to the Bitcoin mainnet via a soft fork without success; this time, he has chosen a hard fork as an experimental ground for innovation. Sztorc believes that a competitive ecosystem composed of multiple L2 networks can effectively prevent the over-concentration of developer power and give Bitcoin the potential to serve billions of users worldwide. Unlike the 2017 Bitcoin Cash fork, eCash does not use the Bitcoin brand name, has provided sufficient advance notice to the market, and will offer coin-splitting tools to help users safely separate their assets. Sztorc stated that this fork is not technically necessary but stems from the current state of the Bitcoin community. He believes that Bitcoin Core developers have become conservative, self-serving, lazy, and corrupt, and that miners have failed to fulfill their responsibility to maximize revenue, with many deep-seated, hard-to-fix problems existing in Bitcoin culture. Therefore, he chose to restart the experiment via a hard fork. The name eCash was chosen to pay tribute to cryptographer David Chaum. In the 1980s and 90s, Chaum launched a project of the same name, eCash, exploring private electronic payments through blind signature technology. Although his company, DigiCash, eventually went bankrupt in 1998, this early